This is part two of a series discussing my process when I write a story. If you’re interested in the first part, on constructing an outline, you can find it here. It’s recommended reading for this post because, like all good processes, this step builds on the previous one so some of what I suggest here will not work that well unless you’ve written an outline. As with everything I write about my process, this is an outline of what I do. I have constructed this process through trial and error, basing much of what I do on what I learned in elementary writing exercises filtered through constant experimentation with the methods of other, more skilled writers. The result is not gospel by any means. Many things people have suggested as good writing methods I have tried and rejected. I expect others will try my methods and reject them in turn, which is good and right.

With all the disclaimers out of the way, how do I go about turning an outline into a series of narrative scenes that tie together?

Well, the first thing is that I think about the story a lot. I know that seems like a given, many people mull of their stories from time to time over the course of the day. However the thing that I try to do is be very deliberate about it. When I am at work and I have a very repetitive, hands on task like cleaning equipment scheduled for the day I look over my outline, pick two to four points and ruminate on them while performing that activity.

During this process I generally ask myself three basic questions:

1. Who are the characters in this scene?
2. How would they cause the events of the scene?
3. How do those actions lead to the next scene?

Each of these questions is actually quite complex, less because the question itself is tricky but because there may be no good answer to the question as the situation stands. For example, if the outline calls for Roy to be the only character in a scene but he needs someone who can read records of the Forever Wars written in ancient Iberian then the scene cannot progress. Roy doesn’t speak or read Iberian in any form. Thus I have to add a character to the scene to help him with this by either adding a character who can read Iberian or by adding another scene where Roy hunts down someone to translate for him.

Ideally, the events of a scene should naturally grow from who is present and what the events of a previous scene were. The first scene or two of a story are thus the most important. They’re going to set up all the pieces that drive the story so any inconsistencies there are going to spread through the rest of the story. Early errors only get worse as time goes on. That’s why I find the outlining process so valuable as it lets me see those cracks forming without spending a whole lot of time writing and rewriting the story.

In general I begin with the situation characters are in at the beginning of a scene and think about how that character would respond to it. I prefer a good, steady escalation to a scene so I begin with dialog and ramp up to actions taken. That doesn’t mean characters will always begin a scene by talking but dialog, even if it’s never used, helps you get an idea of what your characters are thinking about and what their perspectives are. Those thoughts may be best expressed directly through action. However I find that sitting down and talking over the situation with the characters the best way for me to get into their heads.

Yes, this means I am often at work, performing maintenance and having imaginary conversations with people that don’t exist. Don’t judge me. It works very well for me about 99% of the time and that is what is most important. Can’t guarantee it will work for you unless you give it a try.

Now as I mentioned above, in this stage I will often end up expanding on the outline or tweaking aspects of it in order to better reflect my answering the questions I ask myself in building a scene. I mentioned adding a scene where Roy goes to find a translator in my example above. Generally I don’t go back and modify my “final” outline as I do this although it would probably help me if I did. The outline is my road map as I plan these scenes. It’s how I plan the direction of scenes and having these things on hand is helpful, especially if I wind up taking a break part way through writing something. But as you can see in the outline I posted last week, many elements are missing from it.

The perfect example of how turning an outline into scenes can create new elements of your story is the “character” of Jonathan Riker’s Statue. I created the Statue to “watch” certain events that the point of view characters of the story couldn’t be allowed to see. They were still important events to the story and the audience needed to know them. However letting the characters see them would cause them to intervene. I couldn’t let Roy or Brandon see the captured children moving around town, watching the townspeople, for example. However letting the audience know about them was important to building the atmosphere. So I chose to create a point of view that could watch but not intervene to give the audience that perspective and that turned out to be the Statue, which grew into a much bigger POV character that I ever intended it to be.

Finally, transitions between scenes merits a lot of thought because it frames the next scene. You don’t just want to think about how you are going to get from one scene to the next you have to think about how you are going to put the events of the next scene into motion. Again, an outline is a great tool for keeping that kind of perspective in mind. However there’s another element to scene transitions to keep in mind.

Chapter transitions are a very important factor in writing your story. Each chapter needs to be a fairly contained narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end but also push the reader into the next chapter so that they’ll keep reading, be it immediately or after they get back from work that evening. It’s tempting to think of chapter transitions as scene transitions.

They are not.

A scene transition is like lobbing a ball from one platform to the next. There may be two or three of them in a chapter and that’s fine, you don’t have to create all of them as if they were chapter transitions. A chapter transition is a hard break in the action. I generally start creating a chapter break by creating a scene transition but when the ball reaches the apex of its arc between platforms that becomes the chapter break point. Then I clean up the two sides of the break point to preserve point of view and continuity.

So there you have it. General things I do while writing a scene, more things I think about than things I actually do when I am sitting at the keyboard pressing buttons or scribbling on a notepad. Generally I try and have these things half way worked out in my mind before I get to the physical writing. Again, this is something to try and I hope it will help you. Let me know how it works for you if you do!

At the beginning of the year I set myself a number of writing goals, one of which was to document and share my own process of writing. During the writing of A Candle in the Wind I took a few notes beyond the normal. Now I share the outcome with you, in the hopes that there is something here that can help the writer looking to refine their own process. This is just what I’ve found works best for my own writing. I encourage anyone trying to streamline their own writing process to experiment. There’s no guarantee any of this will prove helpful but creative writing is one of those things where you don’t really know if a technique will fit you until you try.

Note that the point of this isn’t to tell you how to come up with an idea, premise, characters or setting. This is about how you turn those things into a story. So in writing this I’m going to presume you have all that stuff worked out already and talk about how you arrange those things into a narrative.

The first thing I do is outline my story.

A lot of people say that outlining takes spontaneity or life from your story. My understanding from what they describe is that they feel shackled by their outline and cannot depart from it once they’ve written it down or the story feels listless if written from an outline. These are both the result of mindset, I believe. Some people want to explore their narrative as they write it and then just tweak and refine the narrative once they have it all down. Others lose interest in the story once they have all the beats worked out.

While neither of these are an innate shortcoming of outlining your story if you find either of these things to be the case outlining is not likely to be a helpful technique for you. Fighting that bent in your personality probably isn’t worthwhile. Everyone creates differently and it’s better to lean into your own proclivities than to try and contort your own thought processes to a particular technique. But if neither of these are the case I strongly suggest outlining as a huge time saver before you get into the meat of your story.

The point of an outline is to establish a structure and check for major contradictions before you spend hours typing out early chapters. In general I try to lay out between 15 and 25 basic plot beats I want to take place. Some outlining guides suggest including “up” or “down” in your beats but that is not something I do any longer, although I did try it at one time.

Once I have the beats laid out I work backwards, checking if I need to set up anything early on that will pay off later in the story. I also look for beats that contradict each other. Once the outline is written I leave it for two or three days then reread it with fresh eyes, looking for contradictions and asking if I like the story. In general the beats get rewritten 4-5 times. For an idea of what the finished product looks like, here’s the final outline from A Candle in the Wind.

• Roy is in the jail of Riker’s Cove, watched by Sheriff Avery Warwick
• We learn what brings him to the Cove, get the first hints of Heinrich von Nighburg’s identity and why Warwick wants him to leave
• Roy agrees to leave and take the other members of Tyson’s Nine with him but the Fairchilds sneak by into town
• Roy rallies the available members of the Nine and they make a new plan to sneak by the Sheriff
• The Fairchilds and Warwick meet when Cassandra frees a child from Nighburg’s influence
• Brandon and Cassie leverage their saving the Strathmore boy to convince Warwick to let Roy and company back into the town
• Roy and the Fairchilds reunite but before anything is discussed Nighburg retaliates, sacrificing a captured child to the Voices
• Roy and Avery get a glimpse of the mindscape before breaking Nighburg’s enchantment and ending Nighburg’s attack
• Roy and Co regroup and meet with Jonathan Riker’s son to plan their attack on Nighburg’s lighthouse
• We learn that Jonathan was the one who called in the favor Tyson’s Nine owed his father and the group makes a plan
• Strathmore joins the group and they break into the lighthouse, discovering the mirror into Nighburg’s extradimensional manse
• The manse is explored as Nighburg makes several stealthy mental attacks on them
• Nighburg slips past the town’s defenders as the Voices play havoc with their emotions and awareness
• He attempts to fulfill his ritual during the eclipse by executing Jenny Riker on the lighthouse beacon but Strathmore intervenes, dying in the process
• Strathmore’s life is enough to push the ritual halfway to completion and Roy is forced to fight Nighburg in the beacon chamber to prevent it’s completion
• When Roy throws Nighburg off the lighthouse he accidentally completes the ritual and the Voices of Taun begin to reach into the world fully
• We see the defenders of Riker’s Cove rally and hold them off for a time but their stamina wanes
• The Strongest Man in the World arrives at the last moment, the last of Tyson’s Nine, and wards off the Voices, returning the world to normal
• Characters go their own ways, with the Strongest Man warning Roy that now that he’s touched creatures from Beyond he will never be as firmly a part of his world as he was before

Since I just lay out beats in a text file and edit them as I go I don’t have a change log of the entire thing. It didn’t occur to me to save it. That said, I don’t recall very many major changes at the outlining stage. If you’ve read A Candle in the Wind, however, you can see that some elements did change between this point and the final product.

For example, many things were added, like the mayor of Riker’s Cove or Chester Tanner entering the narrative and the Statue of Jonathan Riker serving as a framing device, but the essential structure only changed in a couple of points. Tanner turned out to be related to the child Nighburg killed. That meant it made more sense for him to go into the tower rather than Strathmore – after all, Stu still needed his dad and Chester’s nephew… well, he didn’t. That change was at once important and not really that big of a deal. It required the change of one character for another but very little in the outline rested on that side character so the replacement was fairly easy to make.

By working out most of the major structural changes at the point where the entire story is less than a page of text it’s possible to check for contradictions quickly and consider the implications of changes on the broad scale without having to streamline details over and over again. This is the biggest strength of the outline.

The second thing is that there is a lot of room for improvisation and creativity between those major story beats. As I said already, the use of the statue as a framing device didn’t come around until after this step. I had all the characters and magic powers in mind before I started on this but some of the interactions, like Brandon serving as the arms of an enlarged lightbox for Johan, were things that came up on the fly. Again, some say writing an outline robs the story of spontaneity but I think that has more to do with a writer’s perception than reality.

As I said before, some authors will undoubtedly find outlining their story robs them of a drive to write it because now they know how it ends. If that’s the case for you then by all means, don’t use an outline. But if you’ve been discouraged from using one because you’ve been told you’re putting shackles on yourself I’d highly encourage you to try it once or twice. It may be just what you need to get yourself across the finish line. Tune in next week and we’ll talk about how to get from an outline to scenes.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about miracles and magic and, in the process, I mentioned hard and soft magic systems. This is an aspect of storytelling that many writers have very strong opinions about. Having strong opinions about storytelling is fine! In fact, that is a big part of what we do here, on this particular corner of the Internet! As I stated before, the question of hard magic versus soft magic is a question of systems. Hard magic is very systematized, with rules, costs, predictable outcomes, and so forth where as soft magic works because it works, with no clear rational.

Each of these approaches to showing magic in your story has its pros and cons. There’s also no clear and obvious lines where one class of magic starts and the other ends, which we’re going to look at in more detail in a bit but before that we have to talk about why the divide exists in the first place.

Every story has a goal. Whether it’s to create a mood, recount events or help you get to know a cast of characters one of the most important things for a storyteller is to keep that goal in mind and choose the techniques that bring you closest to fulfilling that goal. Many people who write about minutia like hard or soft magic systems don’t consider goals when they do. They analyze magic as if it were a law of nature in and of itself rather than a technique used to leverage the audience further down the path towards your goal, a toolkit to achieve narrative ends.

So for starters, what is in the hard magic toolkit?

The first and biggest aspect is a sense of cause and effect for things that normally cannot happen in real life. All narrative is built on cause and effect. A thing happens, which causes another thing to happen, which causes a final thing to happen which forces a character to make a choice and do something which causes another thing to – well, you get the idea. When something that is impossible happens in your story you may wish to assign it a cause. When impossibilities and their causes start to link together in a system you have hard magic in a nutshell.

The second thing in the toolkit is a sense of stakes. Like a dwindling fuel supply or the bullets in a gun, knowing exactly how much longer a person can do magic before he’s out of gas makes each use of it more tense and more important to how likely that person is to succeed at what they’re trying. This works in many ways. If iron cancels out all magic and the audience knows the villain is hiding an iron knife in their pocket as the confront the hero then we know that the hero is in danger he cannot anticipate. In essence, the more concrete and predictable your magic system the bigger the part it can play in tension or suspense based narrative techniques.

Finally, a hard magic system allows for more creativity in how goals are accomplished. In many stories with a soft magic system a conflict with magic or the harnessing of magic to accomplish a task boils down to concentrating harder or reaching some kind of personal epiphany. Hard magic systems create opportunities for surprising uses of existing magical mechanisms or lateral thinking with simple abilities. These ‘a-ha!’ moments are a lot of fun for the reader. Predicting them ahead of time is very satisfying for the audience as well.

So at what cost do we bring these tools to bear?

Well, first there’s the issue of memory. When the reader has to learn a bunch of things about the way your world works it can be hard to keep track of it all. Especially because there’s never going to be a chance for the reader to apply what they learn. Knowledge that goes unused is the soonest forgotten. Second is the question of complexity. The more moving parts a story has going the more likely your audience is to misunderstand some part of it and loose track of what your story is about.

But the greatest issue might be the time taken in explaining a hard magic system. It’s not fun to stop in the middle of a thrilling car chase for a lecture on how the internal combustion engine works. By the same token, lectures on how magic functions aren’t the most thrilling fiction out there. Finding the best way to explain the details is one of the biggest hurdles to a hard magic system out there.

What is the soft magic tool kit?

It offers you the chance to do things way outside the normal human experience, just like hard magic does, but it also offers a sense of mystery or menace rooted in how little people can actually understand what is happening around them. Soft magic puts the focus on how characters react to the unexpected or supernatural. The demands put on people by circumstances outside of their control are totally different from the demands of controlling a situation by knowledge and skill.

In short, while hard magic is about ingenuity and circumstance soft magic is all about resilience and determination. Finding your way in a world of soft magic is more about you than about the magic. Instead, the magic highlights aspects of a character’s personality, usually in a poetic or ironic fashion. Alternatively it gives voice to an aspect of the world that normally wouldn’t be accessible to the human experience. Consider Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, for example. He’s certainly a magical creature and, as he himself says, he speaks for the trees. Without the soft magic of the Lorax, his eponymous story could not take place.

Now that I’ve laid out these two types of magic, let me ask you a question – what kind of magic do you think JRR Tolkien created for the world of Middle Earth?

If you’ve read deeply about the world and the man, you know this is a trick question. Tolkien doesn’t dive into the supernatural mechanics of his world in The Lord of the Rings and that would seem to indicate a soft magic system. Gandalf, Saruman and Sauron all have potent magical powers. However we rarely see them used and we have no idea how they work when we do see them. Very squishy stuff.

The problem is, Tolkien did have pretty clear mechanics for how all the magic in his world worked. There were rules he put on the system. And, in point of fact, he spent a lot of time making sure the magic and its functions were consistent from beginning to end. He just didn’t sit down and explain it all to the audience and by doing so he turned a hard magic into a soft magic.

All of this is context for understanding the question that I’m really interested in as I write this post. That question being, why make this change? Tolkien could have gone under the hood and explained the One Ring and how the principles under-girding it allowed Sauron to so easily subvert others. He could have explained Gandalf’s command of flames. After all, he understood these things in exhaustive detail, why not take us under the hood, so to speak, and show us the full breadth and potential of his world?

The short answer is he was not writing a story that needed to. Tolkien was a linguist – a philologist, to be exact – and his stories founded in a world that existed to explain languages. However not just any language, poetic language. The great poetic narratives like Beowulf were the focus of Tolkien’s study and were undoubtedly part of his inspiration as he started to craft Middle Earth. By that token, his story was about the great emotional and poetic elements of life. Getting into the nitty gritty of magic really doesn’t play well into the ideas at the heart of his narratives so he chose to ignore them to keep the focus on the sweeping strokes of the human experience.

So ultimately the thing that interests me about hard vs soft magic is less the mechanics of it, though I do think its a worthwhile distinction. What interests me is the why. Every step a writer takes should be made deliberately to help you tell your story or, if it’s not aimed directly at advancing your narrative, shoring up the world and themes of your story. It’s okay to have a hard magic system and know all the ins and outs of the paranormal. However if these details pull the focus away from what you set out to do you may find it’s better to do as Tolkien did and never show the mechanics under the hood.

Ultimately your magic system isn’t supposed to be the heart of your story. Like world building it exists to help your audience get into the story and hold their attention on the plot, characters and themes. Delve as deep into it as you need to in order to maximize those elements. Allowing the magic system to surpass them is going to decrease the impact of those central things substantially unless that system is purposefully designed to go along with those elements.

Just like the hard magic/soft magic scale, the under the hood scale has a lot of gradations. You may need to rewrite things substantially to find the write point in order to find that balance point. But spending the time to be as deliberate as possible in building your story will make it better and that’s worthwhile!